Meditations on Middle-Earth Read online

  Yes, it was a simpler time, and I was a simpler person. I believed with all the ardor of my teenaged heart that as long as I lived my life according to the tenets set forth within the hallowed pages of Seventeen magazine, I could not go wrong. (Although I did spend many a fruitless hour cudgeling my brains while trying to figure out what the heck all of those “Modess . . . Because” ads were selling. In case this phenomenon is before your time, in olden days it was considered indelicate to come right out and talk about, er, feminine hygiene products, even when you were trying to sell them. The ads in question always showed a woman dressed entirely in white, and placed in a romantic, usually moonlit setting, with the only text anywhere in the ad being: “Modess . . . Because.” I kept yelling, “Because what?! Because why?! Dear Lord, tell me, else I shall run stark mad!” at the magazine until Mom made me stop. A friend of mind has since suggested that perhaps all the genteel societal taboos of our past surrounding girlstuff might seem less Neanderthal and more Empowering if we thought of them as contributing to the Women’s Mysteries. “Agatha Christie . . . Because?” I don’t think so.)

  But I digress.

  Then, one fateful day, it all changed. I was reading the new issue of Seventeen, and when I reached the book review column, what did my wondering-albeit-myopic eyes see but a paragraph in praise of something called The Hobbit by someone (O, vile enchanter!) named J. R. R. Tolkien.

  They said it was a good book.

  They said it was a fantasy, but they still said it was a good book.

  They said it was a fantasy, and a good book, and that it would be all right if I actually went out and read it!

  They implied that it would likewise be all right if I admitted to having read it afterward, even if I made said admission out in public where boys could hear me.

  At first I was a bit suspicious. For all I knew, the person writing the book review column was some Machiavellian hag who had decided to give her helpless readers a bum steer because she didn’t want us growing up to be her competition in the field of Matrimony. (Serve her right if we did grow up to snaffle up all the good husband material! That would teach the wizened crone to try having a career and marriage! The very notion!) Were I to read The Hobbit then somehow the boys would know that I had dabbled my frilly pink brain in the dark tarn of fantasy/science fiction and rendered it unattractive thereby. Since I was already wearing glasses, buying clothes in what they then referred to as the “Chub” department, and stuffing whole boxes of tissues into the cups of my Who-Do-You-Think-You’re-Kidding training bra, I was not about to do anything else that might handicap me in the Great Husband Nab-a-thon that was life pre-Liberation.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . and yet, this was Seventeen magazine, my guiding light, my girlie gospel, my glossy guardian angel through the sweltering, noxious, soul-devouring morass of adolescence. (Anyone who thinks I am exaggerating has not been a teenager for a long time.) If I couldn’t trust it, well, what could I trust? Besides, the book did sound kind of . . . interesting. I went to the library and checked it out.

  Shortly thereafter I was back at the library, clawing at the card catalog like a refugee from a Romero movie, only instead of “Braaaaiiins . . . Braaaaiiins . . .”I was moaning, “Tolkiiiieeeeeen . . . Tolkiiiiieeeeen . . .”

  Which brings us to the trilogy. I can’t blame Tolkien for my present writerly state without slopping a big, gooey ladleful of the onus onto the trilogy’s platter.

  I am not the first to blame things on the trilogy. Get any sizeable group of SF writers together and somewhere in it, like a hairball in a bowl of hummus, you will find one or more persons ready to tell you that Tolkien ruined it for everyone by inaugurating the Rule of Trilogies. Yes, according to some people, all post-Tolkien fantasy had to come in three volumes or forget about it. (Of course, there is the little matter of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which might likewise be viewed as the great-great-great-grandpappy of all fantasy trilogies, but don’t bother bringing that up; no one’s going to listen.)

  THE BLACK RIDER

  The Fellowship of the Ring

  Chapter IV: “A Short Gut to Mushrooms”

  Children, before we go on with this tale, let me remind you that all this took place in prehistoric times, before the Internet, before mega-malls, before the inexorable spread of the mammoth “chain” bookstores across the land. Why, in those days, if you wanted a cup of coffee, you could not walk to the corner Starbucks because there was no corner Starbucks, and all we had were woodburning corners that could only be reached uphill both ways in the snow! Dark times indeed.

  Of course there were bookstores, just not in my neighborhood. This meant that when I wanted to get my grubby paws on the trilogy, I had no option but to check it out of the library. The trouble was, I wasn’t the only one who wanted to read it. Someone else had checked out The Fellowship of the Ring, leaving the other two volumes behind.

  I suppose I could have waited for The Fellowship to be returned. A rational person would have waited. But I was a woman possessed, for whom patience was just the name of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. I checked out The Two Towers and started reading the trilogy from the middle outward. I admit that this left me a little bewildered to start with. (“Who is this guy they’re giving the Viking funeral for, and how did he die, and oh wow, is it just me or is that elf Legolas really hot?”) But then, I’d had lots of practice being bewildered by all of those “Modess . . . Because” ads, so poor old Boromir’s launch party was small potatoes as far as maximum total reader ferhoodlement went.

  To make a long story short, I read the trilogy in two-three-one order, and came away from it a changed woman. The next thing I knew I was reading other fantasy novels. I no longer cared whether or not the boys found out about my shameful solitary vice. Who needs boys when you’ve got elves, man?! (Given that I was then attending an all-girls school, my chances of getting an honest-to-Seventeen date with a boy were about equal with the odds of being swept away to Galadriel’s grove by someone tall, dark, and pointy-eared. And since the chances of finding a nice, Jewish elf were about what you’d expect, this was also the first time I even vaguely considered the possibility of falling for someone Different.)

  The stage was set for the final degradation.

  One evening, having declined Lord Ruthven’s invitation to the ball, choosing instead to lounge about the family manor in my peignoir and bunny slippers, I turned on the television. There he was. Him. My him: Legolas the hottie elf. I could tell it was Legolas because he had pointy ears and, as everyone knows, all elves have pointy ears.

  Previous to beholding him I had not realized that all elves likewise had pointy sideburns, puddingbowl hair-styles, upswept slanty eyebrows, and blue velour shirts, but I was willing to learn. By the time I finally came to comprehend that what I was watching/drooling over was not a televised version of the trilogy (William Shatner would not make a good hobbit in this or any other universe) it was too late: I’d become hooked on Star Trek. I was doomed.

  You might think that once you are wallowing in the fantasy/science-fictional gutter there is nowhere lower for you to sink. Shows what you know, bucko.

  Let us move the clock forward a tick or two, bringing us to my bright college years at Vassar. At that time, Vassar was not yet coeducational, so we are still talking about a heavy concentration of female hormones all dressed up and nowhere to go but the dorm TV room. We attended scheduled airtimes for Star Trek and Dark Shadows with a zealous regularity that left enclosed orders of Carmelite nuns looking like flibbertigibbets. But all of our merry schoolgirl crushes on emotionless Vulcans and haughty vampires did not mean we were averse to dating real men. (Though it might account for why so many of us went on to marry lawyers.)

  I too wanted to date a real man, but wound up settling for a Yalie. He invited me to the prom; and while in lovely New Haven I discovered something that opened my eyes to a whole new world of primal, visceral, earth-shaking ecstacy: the Yale Co-op. When it comes to bookstores, size
does matter.

  It was here I bought the final nail in my coffin: Bored of the Rings. This was a parody of the trilogy produced by the Harvard Lampoon that was wonderful or sophomoric or both, according to the reader’s taste. Since I was a sophomore at the time, I found it to be wonderful. From reading Bored of the Rings I learned that it was possible to take the adored icons and sacrosanct quest-plot and stick big red squeaky clown noses on anything that didn’t get out of the way fast enough. (It’s been my opinion that a good book can take a good joke and survive. Tolkien’s work went the full ten rounds against Bored of the Rings and came back swinging. And even when they take a cream pie in the face, elves are still hot!)

  I will draw a merciful veil over subsequent Tolkien-related incidents in my life, though some were educational. For example, when everything by Tolkien was flying off the shelves, publishers started trotting out anything by Tolkien, which might or might not have included his laundry lists. My apologies to Tolkien completists out there, but I never did appreciate The Silmarillion. Yet thus did I learn that if you become famous/profitable enough as a writer, every last word you ever penned in your lifetime will get trucked to market. (Note that “you ever penned in your lifetime” need not always apply, viz: V. C. Andrews.)

  On the other hand, the Rankin-Bass animated production of The Hobbit and the Ralph Bakshi stab at Lord of the Rings were both . . . never mind. As with Bored of the Rings, we are in the realm of personal tastes, the ubiquitous YMMV of the Internet. Let’s sidestep the flamewar and just change the subject.

  So you see that I am fully within my rights when I refuse to accept responsibility for having become a writer of (often deliberately) funny fantasy and science fiction. It is all Tolkien’s fault. His books were the gateway drug and yes, the first one was free. At his doorstep and no other must I abandon the following accusations:

  1. Reading The Hobbit led me to read the three books of The Lord of the Rings. (And reading the books out of numerical order allowed me to understand that a good book is fully capable of standing alone even if it is one of a litter of three.)

  2. Reading The Lord of the Rings led me to read other fantasy.

  3. The Lord of the Rings—especially the Appendices—led me to realize that a good fantasy is one that springs from a fully realized world, and that constructing that world can be an awful lot of fun. When I wrote my first fantasy novel, if the characters did not all hail from one bland, uniform, all-encompassing Fairytale Culture, if they actually got a little frazzled and weary while on the road, if they remembered to pack a lunch—and other supplies—for the trip, and if they learned that even if you take down the Bad Guys, your world can never go back to being just the way it was before, all of the above was thanks to Tolkien.

  I know he’s not the only one to have included those little details, but for me, he was the first.

  4. The interesting characters in The Lord of the Rings (i.e. hottie elves) led me to watch Star Trek.

  5. Star Trek led me to read science fiction as well as watch it.

  6. Reading science fiction and fantasy led me into the James Fenimore Cooper trap. (J. F. C. was reading novels to his sick wife when he was reputed to have become fed up and exclaimed “Who wrote this muck? I could do better!” And he did, in his opinion, though definitely not in that of Mark Twain.) Yes, I became convinced that I could write no-pun-intended rings around some of the stuff that was actually getting published.

  Thus began the long, hard apprenticeship of the pen (read: Hell) that brought me to my present low estate.

  7. Reading Tolkien allowed me to understand what was so downright hilarious about Bored of the Rings, which in turn opened my eyes to the wide-open land of opportunity for writing funny fantasy and science fiction.

  8. Writing per se led me to try writing with the avowed intention of getting money for it. This meant I would have to learn how to get money from editors, and if you think this is an easy task you are either armed with a crowbar, you are someone named Big Rocko, or you are armed with someone named Big Rocko. My first professional fiction sale was, in fact, a funny science-fiction story with a strong fantasy element (“The Stuff of Heroes,” which appeared in the March 1983 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine), and that was it, the end of the road. I was lost beyond all hope of heaven to redeem.

  But I got paid for it! And, having once tasted the fruits of victory (after I cashed the check and went out and bought some fruits, that is), I went back and did it again. And again. And again, and again, and again, and—!

  So here I am and here I stay. Call me an ink-stained wretch or a pixel-packin’ mama, but the underlying definition’s the same: I am a writer, irrevocably seduced into the lush, steamy, torrid jungle of speculative fiction where even now I dwell, captive and content to be so. And whose fault is that, might I ask?

  Tolkien’s. None other. The culpability rests solely with him.

  Well, him and those elves. Mm-mmh!

  THE RING

  AND I

  HARRY TURTLEDOVE

  I discovered The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in summer 1966. I was seventeen; I had just graduated from high school, and was about to head off to the California Institute of Technology. I liked The Hobbit pretty well: well enough, at any rate, that I bought the trilogy to see what else J. R. R. Tolkien had written.

  With The Lord of the Rings I was utterly entranced, and have been from that day to this. What struck me most about the trilogy was the astonishing depth of Tolkien’s creation. He had not simply imagined the fictional present in which his characters were living, but also a history thousands of years deep, as well as not one but several fictional languages. And what had happened in the dim and distant past of this created world kept bubbling up and remaining intensely relevant to the fictional present, in much the same way as Arminius the German’s defeat of the Roman legions at the Teutoberg Wald in 9 A.D. remains intensely relevant to the history of Europe during the century.

  I read The Hobbit and the trilogy obsessively. In the year after finding them, I must have gone through them, appendices and all, six or eight times. This was, of course, my freshman year at an academically demanding institution. Falling head over heels in love with The Lord of the Rings isn’t the only reason I flunked out of Caltech. It isn’t even the most important reason. But the time I spent with Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin was time I didn’t spend—and should have spent—with physics and calculus and chemistry.

  Nor was I the only one at Caltech caught up in Tolkien’s spell. There were about ten of us, three or four, as luck would have it, in my residence house. We would get together when we could to try to stump one another with obscure quotations, to seek to work out the meanings of elvish words, and to argue about things as abstruse and unprovable as how well a Roman legion suddenly transported to the universe of The Lord of the Rings might fare: of this last, more anon.

  We searched through the books for hints about how the unwritten history of the Fourth Age might go as diligently as fifth-century theologians went over the New Testament for clues as to the nature or natures of Christ. I came to the conclusion that the chief evil power of the Fourth Age would be the Lord of the Nazgûl. This is, no doubt, heresy of the purest ray serene, but, like the Arians or Nestorians of early Christendom, I had some texts on my side.

  Consider: The Fourth Age is to be the Age of Man, with the elves and other ancient races vanished or much reduced in power. The Nazgûl, proud men ensnared by Sauron’s schemes, are the great bane of mankind. When Merry hamstrung the Lord of the Nazgûl, he did so with a blade from the Barrow-downs, a blade specially made with charms against Sauron’s chief lieutenant, who had been the Witch-king of Angmar in the north. But when Owyn struck the blow that finished the Ringwraith, what sword did she use? Only an ordinary weapon of the Rohirrim. And when the Nazgûl’s spirit left him, it “faded to a shrill wailing, passing with the wind, a voice bodiless and thin that died, and was swallowed up and was never heard again
in that age of the world [italics mine].” Not in the Third Age, certainly. But what of the Fourth?

  I may also note that, having thus been disembodied, the Lord of the Nazgûl was not caught, as were the other eight of his kind, in the incinerating eruption of Mount Doom after the Ring went into the fire. And, in a footnote to letter 246 in Carpenter’s collection, Tolkien, who had been talking about how Frodo would have fared had he faced the remaining eight Nazgûl, writes, “The Witch-king [the Lord of the Nazgûl] had been reduced to impotence.” Tolkien does not say the Ringwraith was slain, so I have, at least, a case.

  Such was my reasoning. I should also note at this point that I was already trying to become a writer. I’d tried to write three different novels, and had actually finished one (none of this work, I hasten to add, came within miles of being publishable). The summer of 1967 was among the blackest times of my life. I had no idea how to cope with academic failure—thinking I could excel without studying much, as I had in high school, was a contributing factor, and not such a small one, to my flunking out of Caltech.

  And so I plunged into a new novel. It was, of course, an exercise in hubris, complete and unadorned. I realize that now. I did not realize it when I was eighteen. There are a great many things one does not realize at eighteen, not least among them being how very many things one does not realize at eighteen. Taking some of the arguments from the Caltech dorms, my own growing interest in history, and my belief that the Lord of the Nazgûl survived, I dropped a couple of centuries of Caesar’s legionaries (and one obstreperous Celt) into what I imagined Gondor would be like during the Fourth Age.

  God help me, I still have the manuscript. The one thing I can truthfully say is that I meant no harm. (I take that back. I can say one other thing: I am not the individual mentioned in letter 292 of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, the chap who not only aimed to write a sequel to The Lord of the Rings but sent Tolkien a detailed outline of it. That letter dates from December 1966, before part of the same bad idea occurred to me.)